I met up with fellow Youtube polyglot, Moses McCormick (see his Youtube channel) in Columbus, Ohio and the two of us went to a mall simply to walk up to complete strangers and practise a bunch of languages with them!

It's what I like to call “social skydiving”, although usually the strangers I go up to are in social events or parties, which is not that hard since they expect interactions with strangers. But Moses does what he calls levelling up, which he demonstrates excellently in this video. This really is with complete strangers in pretty much any situation. And it turns out it's easier than you think!

It really proves that your location does not matter if you want to be able to practise a language. I hear or read about people complaining that they can't travel and therefore can't learn languages – I really have to refer you to this guy! He has learned all of his languages in the United States, and travelled very little. The fact that he has done this in Ohio really emphasises how much more accessible languages are than you think.

When you are genuinely practising with human beings, then when you go home afterwards you will study way more efficiently because of the context of use.

He has dabbled in several dozens of languages, and in the video above you can hear him go into Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Tamil, Hindi, French, Spanish, Fulani and Wolof, which is a sampling from European, African and Asian languages. You can also hear me speak too in some Mandarin, Spanish and French.

The other guy in the video is Eric, who has gone on levelling up sessions with Moses in the past and who also had a Looxciecam that attaches to your ear and sends the video signal via bluetooth to your smartphone for recording. I took the time to edit down both videos together and add in the audio from my own clip-on microphone to make it more watchable. Moses has all two hours of unedited footage on his channel, but you can see the most interesting parts in this shortened edit.

After the experience, I sat down with him to interview him about levelling up, how it works, how he got into it and why others should consider giving it a try:

As well as the full footage of our time in the mall and the two stores, you can see the full video of the first time we ever met below.

Unlike my Youtube channel, which almost exclusively has videos that I try to keep short and edited as professionally as possible as much as I can, Moses loves to record as much of his stuff as he can to upload immediately without any editing, so he took out his iPhone and started recording me literally just after I got in the car from him picking me up at the bus stop.

You can see that full conversation (more like Moses interviews Benny discussing my travel hacks, and what I'm doing in the states) here:

I'd really appreciate it if you shared that first video on Facebook so more people can get inspired to get out and speak their target language no matter where they are. Let me know what you think of the videos in the comments below!